An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

It’s relatively uncommon for managers to be unwilling to answer these kinds of questions. (Either they’re open and glad to share or are willing to speak about themselves.) However, it is fairly common for them to not know the answers.

Companies will always need someone to run their cost-accounting initiatives, to set up their approach to on-call, to iterate on their engineer-recruiting process. Strong execution in these crosscutting projects will give you the same personal and career growth as managing a larger team.

This realization was very important and empowering for me: you can always find an opportunity to increase your scope and learning, even in a company that doesn’t have room for more directors or vice presidents.

It also changed how I hire engineering managers, allowing me to switch from the pitch of managing a larger team as the company grows—an oversubscribed dream if there ever was one—to a more meaningful and more reliably attainable dream of growing scope through broad, complex projects.

If you’ve been focused on growing the size of your team as the gateway to career growth, call bullshit on all that,13 and look for a gap in your organiz...

It took me two years as a manager to reach the “leadership is lonely” phase. Folks had warned me that it would happen, and it did. The team was struggling to acclimatize after acquisition, and I felt like I was carrying the stress alone.

When I began managing managers, things shifted. I felt certain that I knew how to solve all the problems, but I didn’t know how to rely on others to solve them, and often learned of problems long after they’d deteriorated. Delegation, metrics, meetings, and process—practices that I’d considered obvious or unimportant—crept into my tool kit, and I started to regain my footing.

4.8.1 Scarce feedback, vague direction For much of your early career, you’ll have folks who are routinely giving feedback on your work. As your span of responsibility grows, particularly if it’s somewhat specialized, increasingly no one will feel responsible for or able to provide that feedback.

As a functional leader, you’ll be expected to set your own direction with little direction from others.

If you don’t supply it yourself, you’ll start to feel the pull of irrelevance: Maybe no one really cares what we do? What would happen if I stopped showing up? Maybe I should be doing something different? That initial instinct to leave after hitting a pocket of seeming irrelevance is a comforting one, but it’s the wrong way to go. You can certainly avoid the current swells of ambivalence by switching jobs, but if you’re successful at another company then you’ll end up in the same situation. This is a symptom of success. You have to learn the lesson it’s trying to teach you: How to set your organization’s direction and your own.

it’s an unsettling period when you lose access to what used to make you happy—partnering directly with a team—and haven’t found new sources of self-worth in your work.

This isn’t the only reason this transition is hard, it’s also hard because a lot of your skills and habits stop working well.

This is particularly frustrating, because your ability to put your head down and solve gritty, important problems was probably a big part of how you were promoted.

Close out. Close it out in a way such that this specific ask is entirely resolved. This means making a decision and communicating it to all involved participants. This strategy is a success if this particular task never comes back to you; and your goal is to finish this particular task as quickly and as permanently as possible. Solve. Design a solution such that you won’t need to spend time on this particular kind of ask again in the next six months. This is often designing norms or process, but depending on the kind of issue, this might be coaching an individual. With this option, your goal is to finish off an entire category of tasks. Delegate. Ideally, this is to redirect the ask to someone who is responsible for that kind of work, but sometimes it is a one-off. If you can’t close out a task or solve it, your only other option is to delegate it to someone who either has the specialized skills to close/solve it, or who can work in the system.

However, in the long run our measure is not in what we say or how skillfully we say it, but in what we do, and the abacus tallying our actions is organizational culture.

Since then, I’ve found a framework for thinking about inclusion efforts that is simple but that has allowed me to think about the problem broadly, identify useful programs, and move from anxiety to implementation. The basis: an inclusive organization is one in which individuals have access to opportunity and membership. Opportunity is having access to professional success and development. Membership is participating as a version of themselves that they feel comfortable with.

There are workplaces where everyone around you is delightful, the customers are friendly, and you feel respected, but you still return home each night dissatisfied. Occasionally an interesting project will come up, but those typically go to more tenured folks. When I think about having access to opportunity, I think about ensuring that folks can go home most days feeling fulfilled by challenge and growth.

There are infinite ways to create and distribute opportunity! Some of the programs that I have found more helpful are: Rubrics everywhere. Every important people decision should have a rubric around how folks are evaluated. This is true for promotions, performance designations, hiring, transitions into management, and pretty much everything else! Selecting project leaders.1 Having a structured approach to selecting project leads allows you to learn from previous selections, and to ensure that you’re not concentrating opportunity on a small set of individuals. Explicit budgets. Many companies take a “spend it like your own money” approach to budgets, which often leads to large inconsistencies across individuals. Instead of saying that you’ll pay for teams to attend a reasonable number of conferences per year, specify a fixed number. Instead of maintaining a general ongoing education budget, make it explicit. Nudge involvement. Many people are uncomfortable applying to opportunities, using education budgets, asking for mentorship, etc. It’s very effective to reach out to those folks directly and recommend they apply. Even more powerful is showing them where they fall on a distribution: it’s one thing to know that you’ve never used your education budget, and something else entirely to know that you’re the only person who isn’t using it. Education programs. Create ongoing training and learning programs that are available for everyone, or, for example, for all managers.

If you’re spending so much energy wondering whom you’ll eat lunch with, that’s energy you can’t spend being creative. If the idea of going to work gives you anxiety, at some point you’re going to decide to stop coming. Membership is the precondition to belonging.

Just as when you collect the data to measure opportunity, this will require some partnership with human resources, but it’s well worth the effort. A second similarity between the two is that balancing opportunities for membership across a large population is pretty tricky. Many activities and events don’t work well for everyone—meals can be difficult for individuals with complex dietary restrictions, physical activities make some uncomfortable, activities after working hours can exclude parents—and success here requires both a broad portfolio of options and a willingness to balance concerns across events and time.

Combine efforts on opportunity and membership, and you will find yourself solidly on the path to an inclusive organization. This strategy doesn’t have much flash, but results are louder than proclamations.

Have you ever worked at a company where the same two people always got the most important projects? Me

This is so important that I’ve come to believe that having a wide cohort of coworkers who lead critical projects is one of the most important signifiers of good organizational health.

Define the project’s scope and goals in a short document. Particularly important are identifying: Time commitment. People need to decide if they must ask permission from their managers. Requirements to apply. If there are no requirements, say so explicitly; otherwise, a lot of folks will assume that there are, and will opt out. Selection criteria. If multiple individuals apply, how will you select the project leader between them?

Announce the project to a public email list, at an all-hands, over Slack, or however your company does persistent communication; I tend to use email for these. What’s most important is that you: Allow folks to apply in private. Some individuals will be uncomfortable applying in public. Make sure that applicants don’t see who else has applied. Some people will see someone they view as senior apply, and will immediately disengage because they feel that they are less qualified. Give at least three working days for people to apply. Do this whenever possible, as some folks will need to talk with their manager or peers to muster up the confidence to apply.

Nudge folks to apply who you think would be good candidates but who might not self-select. This is particularly important for ...

Select a project leader based on the selection criteria you specified. Take the time to consider every single applicant against the criteria, and, if possible write up a paragraph or two about each of them. Once you’ve selected the leader, pr...

Sponsor the project leader by finding someone who has successfully completed a similar project to be their advisor. This sponsor will be accountable for coaching the leader to successful completion. This is a great learning opportunity for sponsors, as they are typically folks who are great at doing things thems...

Notify other individuals who applied that they were not selected. It’s extremely helpful if you provide them feedback on why you didn’t select them. Sometimes it’s because they’ve already done something great and you want to create room for another p...

Kick off the project, notifying the same folks who received the application announcement who the project leader is, who the sponsor is, and wha...

Record the project, who was selected, and who the sponsor is into a public spreadsheet. Also ...

The first few times you do this, it will feel very constraining and inefficient. Previously, you would have just sent a ping to a favored individual and they’d have been off and running, but now you have to run a slower and more deliberate process. Increasingly, though, I believe this is the most important change in my approach to leadership over the past few years. Done well, it can be the cornerstone in your efforts to grow an inclusive organization.

While companies are literally composed of teams,5 I’ve found it surprisingly common to meet folks who feel as if they are not a member of any team.

I’ve worked on a few teams in which folks consistently looked out for each other, and believed they’d all come out better together. These were teams that had individuals willing to disappoint the teams they managed in order to help their peers succeed. It wasn’t that these folks were ready to callously disappoint people. Rather, they balanced outcomes from a broad perspective that included their peers.

I’ve come to believe that supporting their creation is simple—albeit hard—work, and when the conditions are fostered, they lead to an exceptionally rewarding work environment.

The ingredients necessary for such a team are: Awareness of each other’s work. Even with the best intentions, a member cannot optimize for their team if they’re not familiar with other members’ work. The first step to moving someone’s identity to their peers is to ensure that they know about their peers’ work.

Evolution from character to person. When we don’t know someone well, we tend to project intentions onto them, casting them as a character in a play they themselves are unaware exists. It’s quite challenging to optimize on behalf of characters in your mental play, but it’s much easier to be understanding of people you know personally. Spending time together learning about each other, often at a team offsite, will slowly transform strangers into people.

Refereeing defection. In game theory, there is an interesting concept of a dominant strategy. A dominant strategy is one that is expected to return the maximum value regardless of the actions of other players. Team collaboration is not a dominant strategy. Rather, it depends on everyone participating together in good faith. If you see someone acting against the interests of the team, you, too, will likely defect to pursue your own self-interest.

Avoiding zero-sum culture. Some companies foster zero-sum cultures, in which perceived success depends on capturing scarce, metered resources, like head count.

Making it explicit. If you have the first four ingredients, you still have to explicitly discuss the idea of shifting folks’ identities away from the team they support and toward the team of their peers. It’s hard to move membership from the team you spend the most time with, and I haven’t seen it happen organically.

Given how much energy it takes to shift the identities of a team of managers away from the folks they support and toward their peers, I think it’s quite reasonable to question whether it’s genuinely worth doing it. You’ll be unsurprised to know that I think it is.

The best learning doesn’t always come directly from your manager, and one of the most important things a first team does is provide a community of learning. Your peers can only provide excellent feedback if they’re aware of your work and are thinking about your work similarly to how you are. Likewise, as you’re thinking about your peers’ work, you’ll be able to learn from how they approach it differently than you anticipate. Soon, your team’s rate of learning will be the sum of everyone’s challenges, no longer restricted to just your own experiences.

Long term, I believe that your career will be largely defined by getting lucky and the rate at which you learn. I have no advice about luck, but to speed up learning I have two suggestions: join a rapidly expanding company, and make your peers your first team.

Ensuring that internal candidates take part is essential to an inclusive culture. Fair consideration doesn’t mean that we prefer internal candidates. Rather, it means that there is a structured way for them to apply, and for us to consider them.

Peer and team feedback. Collect written feedback from four or five coworkers. Include peers on other teams. Include people the applicants have managed. Include people they would not have managed. My biggest advice? Lean into controversial feedback, not away from it. Listen to would-be dissenters, and hear their concerns.

A 90-day plan. The applicant writes a 90-day plan of how they’d transition into the role, and what they would focus on. They emphasize specific tactics, time management, and where they’d put their attention. This is also a great opportunity to understand their diagnosis of the current situation. Provide written feedback to them on their plan. Have them incorporate that feedback into their plan. This is an opportunity to try out working together in the new role.

Vision/strategy document. The applicant writes a combined vision/strategy document. It outlines where the new team will be in two to three years, and how they’ll steer the team to get there. Provide written feedb...

Vision/strategy presentation. Have the applicant present their vision/strategy document to a group of three to four peers. Have the peers ask questions, and see ...

Executive presentation. Have the applicant present their strategy document, one-on-one, with an executive. In particular, test for their ability to adap...

Running the process takes a lot of time, but it’s rewarding time. In fact, this has generated more useful feedback than anythin...